


Soulless and Evil

by Hermoninny_and_the_Waterbeetles



Series: Expecto Patronum [1]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Gen, Marauders
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-16
Updated: 2016-06-16
Packaged: 2018-07-11 21:43:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,759
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7071592
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hermoninny_and_the_Waterbeetles/pseuds/Hermoninny_and_the_Waterbeetles
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's the NEWT Defence Against the Dark Arts patronus practical and the whole year is looking forward to it, the whole year except Remus Lupin. When his friends ask him why it leads to a revelation, which Remus only recently uncovered himself, that he was not bitten by accident. Dementors are said to turn you into something soulless and evil, but if you're already there then what have you got to lose?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Soulless and Evil

**Author's Note:**

> Nothing to mention really except for a lot of swearing. Also Lyall Lupin isn't exactly father of the year.

“Hurry up Remus, we’re gonna be late,” said Peter.  
“Yeah, you guys go on, I’m not actually feeling that well, I think I’m gonna go back the dorm, will you tell Professor Cairnwell for me?”  
“Okay, do you want me to come with you? Maybe you should go to Madam Pomfrey first…”  
“Oi! Wormtail! Moony! What’s the hold up?”

Peter made a ‘shut up and come over here’ gesture with his head, and James sighed and walked back to join them, Sirius following him.

“What?” asked James.  
“Remus is sick.”  
“I’m not… _sick_ sick, just… not feeling well, I’ll be fine, I’ll just go and sleep it off. I’ve got astronomy tonight.”  
“Well why don’t you just skip that then? You don’t want to miss patronuses,” said Sirius.  
“Nah, I’ve got questions about the homework and stuff… look, I don’t want to make you guys late.”  
“Don’t worry about that mate,” said James, “look, do you want one of us to go with you to see Pomfrey? Just to be safe?”  
“It’s nothing like _that_ ,” said Remus quietly.  
“What d’you think it is then?”  
“I don’t know? Something normal! Not fucking revolves around my fucking… look, I’m sure it’s nothing major, and I know it’s nothing _dangerous_ , it’s just a headache.”  
“Well if that’s all it is then just go to Pomfrey, get yourself a potion, you’ll be fine in five minutes and you don’t have to miss class,” said Sirius.  
“No! I don’t want to… gahh!”  
“What don’t you want to do?” asked James, “look, we can’t help if you don’t tell us.”  
“I don’t want you to help, just… just go to the bloody lesson alright?”  
“Mate, you know we can’t just leave you,” said Peter.  
“Yes you can,” said Remus, “I’m capable of taking care of myself for five fucking minutes alright? Look, if it makes you happy I’ll go to Madam Pomfrey…”  
“Okay, come on then,” said James, “Sirius, tell Cairnwell where we are alright?”  
“Sure.”  
“No! I’ll go by myself!”  
“I don’t care about missing five minutes of the lesson Remus,” said James.  
“You’re not sick are you,” said Sirius.

James and Peter gave Sirius a ‘what the fuck are you being a dick for’ look.

“Well I’m right aren’t I,” said Sirius, “come on, you two have done this before,” he said to James and Peter, “I’ve done this before, you just don’t want to go to the lesson do you? Which is totally fine, and we’ll cover for you, but you really should have just said that in the first place, and now I want to know why you didn’t?”

James and Peter turned to Remus now.

“Fine,” said Remus, “I don’t want to go to the lesson, I’ll explain why later, you guys should go now before you’re marked late.”  
“But you’ll miss patronuses,” said James.  
“I don’t care about fucking patronuses,” said Remus.  
“How comes?”  
“How comes what?”  
“How comes you don’t want to do patronuses?”  
“I didn’t say I didn’t want to do them, I said I don’t care.”  
“If you just ‘didn’t care’ you wouldn’t bother skiving off,” said James, “how comes you don’t want to do…”  
“Are you four coming in or not?” called Professor Cairnwell from the door.

Remus groaned.

“Yes, sorry,” said James, and they all filed in.

***

“Come on Lupin, I’m sure you can do better than that. Enthusiasm!”

Remus gave the Professor a borderline sarcastic smile and added a bigger flourish as he said ‘expecto patronum’, still to no avail.

“You’re just not commiting enough, you won’t get anywhere by waving your wand half-heartedly, take your time and…”  
“Think of a memory, yes, I’ve got it, sorry. Look, Professor, I don’t think I’m going to be able to do this…”  
“Well not with that attitude…”  
“I mean, physically, I just don’t think it’s possible… you know… for someone like me.”

He had lowered his voice almost to a whisper now, though in the excited classroom he was pretty sure no one would hear anyway.

“I’m sure you’ve got just as good a chance as everyone else,” chuckled Cairnwell awkwardly, “just… erm… maybe just make sure you don’t think too much about… well, I’m sure you’ll figure it out. Ah! Marvellous effort McKinnon!”  
“So that’s what all this is about,” said Sirius, edging closer towards Remus as Cairnwell walked over to Marlene.  
“All what?”  
“’I’m a poor little werewolf, I can’t make a patronus!’”  
“Shut the fuck up Sirius.”  
“I’m only translating what you just said to Cairnwell into plain English.”  
“He’s right you know,” said James.  
“Oh not you too.”  
“Yes me too! Look, you said yourself just now that not everything revolves around your furry little problem, and you’re right. So crack on and picture the best thing in your life, which is us lot, obviously,” he added, with a little self-mocking hair sweep, “and cast the bloody charm.”

Remus rolled his eyes, but hoped James would never realise that if he was seriously going to attempt this, there would be only one memory he would use.

“Look, this is your chance to prove everyone wrong,” said Sirius, “take it.”  
“But what if I can’t?” said Remus.  
“Well you won’t don’t try,” said James.  
“But what if I try and I still can’t?”  
“Then you’ll be in the same boat as most people in this room,” said Sirius, “look, I haven’t managed anything yet, neither has Peter, James only managed something that looked like a pathetic dribble of old man jizz. No one’s going to think anything of it if you don’t manage it.”  
“I’d just prefer to… look, there are four possibilities here. One, I try and succeed, and everything’s rosy. Two, I try and fail, and everything’s fucked. Three, I don’t try, but if I had I would have succeeded, I drop a few marks in the test, it won’t matter in ten years time. Four, I don’t try, but if I had then I would have failed, in that case I get to live in blissful ignorance and kid myself that I could have done it if only I’d put a bit more effort in. All I’m doing is taking the safe bet.”  
“Fine, go back to shooting yourself in the foot if you want to,” said Sirius, “but this is not the end of this, we’ll talk about this properly later.”

***

“Alright, spill, why is ‘everything fucked’ if you try and fail to cast a patronus.”  
“You fucking know why, Sirius, you know about this kind of thing.”  
“I want you to say it though, because I can't believe you actually buy into that bullshit.”  
“Well would someone say what this is about, 'cause you’re leaving me and James a mile behind here,” said Peter.  
“Care to explain?” asked Sirius.

Remus glared at him.

“Alright then, I’ll do it. Mister Moony here, despite being a learned NEWT student, at the prestigious Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, is under the twin delusions that a- you have to be ‘pure of heart’ to cast a patronus and b- that he, Mister Moony, who once apologised for cutting himself while chopping potions ingredients, does not fit that description.”  
“Alright, you’ve had your little joke, can we please leave it be now.”  
“I’m not fucking joking Moony, I genuinely perplexed as to why…”  
“Look, it’s not that I believe it, I’m just happier not knowing, okay?"  
“But that’s terrible,” said Peter, “you’re the ‘nice one’ everyone says so, if you’re not ‘pure of heart’ then no one is, it doesn’t matter if you’re a werewolf.”  
“Ah! There it is. Thank you Peter, thank you for being the only one here not trying to skirt around the actual issue.”  
“I didn’t mean…” started Peter.  
“We’re not skirting round anything Remus, you’re the one who’s trying to ignore something that’s clearly bothering you,” said Sirius.  
"Well I'm sorry for just trying to get on with my life and not think too much about the possibility that I'm entirely soulless. Maybe when I'm more on top of my homework I'll set some time aside give it a good mulling over."  
“I know people say stupid shit about werewolves Remus, but they’re idiots, you shouldn't believe them,” said James.  
“What can I say, if you bombarded me with the argument that stars were made of sherbert I might start to believe that eventually.”  
“Well that would make you an idiot,” said James.  
“You really have to stop with this ‘idiot’ shit James,” sighed Remus, “if you really think only stupid people hate people like me then you better keep away from me once we’re out in the real world.”  
“I… I… But they are idiots! I don’t if someone’s the fucking Minister for Magic, prejudice stems from ignorance, ignorance in the face of evidence is stupidity.”  
“There’s plenty of fucking evidence for their side too James, you just choose to ignore their side just as much as they ignore mine!”  
“Because they’re evidence is bullshit!”  
“ _I’m_ their evidence!” screamed Remus, it was as if something had snapped inside him, “I’m their fucking evidence! I wouldn’t _be_ like this if there wasn’t any base to their fucking prejudice!”

He turned away, trying to force himself to stop crying.

“Remus…” said James, and Remus felt a hand on his shoulder.  
“Fuck off!” he said, jerking it off.  
“I’m sorry, I wasn’t letting you talk, and I’m sorry, I know I over simplify this shit… if you want to talk about it I’ll listen this time.”  
“Let me just… go to the toilet, alright?”  
“Of course.”

“You do over simplify this shit,” said Sirius, once Remus had left.  
“I know!” said James, “I don’t mean to! I just… I just wish… If everyone just…”  
“But everyone’s not going to,” said Sirius, “let’s just focus on Remus now, yeah?”  
“Yeah.”  
“At least you drew him out on it.”  
“I made him cry, Peter,” said James.  
“You fucked up a bit, we all do, you still didn’t fuck up nearly as bad as I did… you meant well,” said Sirius.  
“I suppose,” said James.

They sat in silence until Remus returned with a dry face.

“I wasn’t bitten by accident,” said Remus heavily.  
“But you always said…” James started, “sorry, carry on.”  
“I always _thought_ it was an accident, I don’t… I don’t really remember if someone told me it was or if I just assumed, but either way, my parents always let me believe it. Then, over Christmas…” Remus sighed, “well, it turned out they lied. I mean, I should have known really, it’s not as if the truth's much of a priority for us. ‘Safety’, it's always ‘safety’, I guess this is just the same, the good old Lupin family motto: ‘don’t rock the boat’. That and my dad’s a huge fucking coward.”  
“What happened?” asked Sirius.  
“When I was bitten or over Christmas?”  
“Both.”  
“Well, over Christmas I got into an argument with my dad, no big deal, we just made the mistake of discussing politics at the table.”  
“What did he say?” asked Peter.  
“Well, there was another werewolf attack in the paper, night before New Year’s,” said Remus, “a horrible one, two children, it was… the pictures would make you feel sick… anyway when stuff like that happens family policy is to pretend it never happened and make sure I don’t get to see the paper. Now, with all these attacks, not just the werewolf ones, I mean, I don’t particularly like missing a day’s news, especially when everyone's home, and I don’t know that you guys are all alright. And besides, the whole system's useless by now because I know that if they don’t save the paper for me the morning after a full moon it means there’s been a werewolf attack. So we’re sitting around having lunch and I say all this, and I get back the usual rubbish, and then my dad throws out the inevitable ‘you’re too young’ argument. Now, when I was an actual child this would normally end it, but I’m nearly seventeen now, so I said so. I said ‘I’m nearly of age’ and he just says _‘nearly’_ , as if that’s a valid argument, so I say ‘I’m sixteen and nine fucking months, I can make my own decisions’. And he says ‘and while you’re under seventeen I’m your bloody legal guardian so I can overrule them’. So I say ‘oh I suppose you’ll be backing this new Bill then so it can last a bit longer’. This whole time my mum’s been crying but when I say that she just starts screaming at us to stop it, and my dad starts yelling at me for making my mum cry, and my mum starts yelling at him for yelling at me while I’m sick, and my dad starts yelling at her that I’m getting too bold, and if there’s one thing I will not stand for it’s people yelling at my mum, so I get between them and tell him to fuck off,” at that point Remus finally took a break to breath, “And then… he says… ‘All I’ve ever done is try to protect you, and part of that is protecting you from knowing certain things’. So I say 'in other words you've been lying to me then, and that means whatever you’re hiding from me in the papers is the truth, or at least you think it is’. My mum’s begging us to stop now, but I ignore her because this is the first time I’ve managed to pin my dad down on this.”  
“You mean… literally?” asked Peter.  
“No, not literally,” said Remus, “though who knows what I might have done if I wasn’t tired as hell from the full moon. But anyway, um… so, I say that, and he just doesn’t say anything, so I wait, and he still doesn’t say anything. And then I notice that he’s crying, and that’s when I know I’ve hit the nail on the damn head. Because he’s _fucking_ crying.”

Remus was crying again now, but he was still continuing so the others didn’t acknowledge it.

“And then my mum says, ‘there are just things that a minority of people do, that the papers always use to push their own agenda…’ etcetera etcetera… so I tell her she doesn’t have to tiptoe around it, that I have been reading the papers freely at school for 5 and a half years now. I know some werewolves are absolute scum and I know the Prophet always has a field day whenever they attack someone. And then my dad finally manages to string some words together and he says ‘can you really blame us for trying to make people like you look a bit more harmless than they are, when we knew everyone else in the world would be doing the opposite?’ And I said, ‘if you believed werewolves like this Greyback person were the exception and not the rule then you wouldn’t have had to lie at all’.”

Remus paused to wipe his eyes. James was just about to say something, though he hadn’t formulated quite what, when Remus continued.

“And then he just broke down, he started apologising, I didn’t really understand half of what he was saying at first. Then my Mum sat me back down, and said it was time to explain something, that I was right, that I was old enough to know the whole truth now. And I guess that brings us on to what happened when I was bitten,” he said, horribly lightly, “because, as it turns out, it was all my dad’s fucking fault, well, and this ‘Greyback’ monster who’s been in the papers for attacking children all these years. It turns out, back when my dad had a proper job in the Department for the Regulation and Control of Magical Creatures, he managed to piss off this maniac werewolf. And how? By saying, to his _face_ , mind, that people like him… people like _me_ … were soulless… evil… deserving nothing but death.”

Remus’s horrible light tone was just on the edge of breaking as he finished the word ‘death’.

The three of them sat there, stunned.

“So there you have it, James” said Remus, still forcing that horrible lighthearted tone, though it was wavering perilously now, “my dad may be many things but he’s not an idiot... he's a fucking expert on magical creatures actually... and according to him I don't even have anything left for a Dementor to suck out of me.”


End file.
